“... and the Apollonian (a term surely preferable to Silk and Stern’s ‘Apolline’), by no means merely represent, as they are often taken to do, a dichotomy of passion and reason, or of emotion and form. The basic element of the Dionysiac is indeed Rausch – ‘rapture’ in Krell’s translation of Heidegger, ‘ecstasy’ in Silk and Stern – but ...”

“... into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, was first ...”

“... by contrast, sees Hopper as a philosophical artist ‘who was concerned with abstract values as a means to a figural end’. This might have surprised Hopper, who, though usually aloof, in the early 1950s joined the editorial board of the artists’ journal Reality, the purpose of which was, in Nivison’s words, ‘to preserve the existence of realism in art ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... with Susan – to have him admitted to hospital. Although it may look at the outset as though Amis means to satirise the trendy anti-psychiatrists of the Sixties and Seventies, this is not, then, the case. Their representative, Collings, seems justified in her criticisms of Stanley, which means that she is also broadly right ...”

“... prototypical dead youth who had sacrificed his life for the Nation. (His funeral was organised by David.) Then, after the fall of Robespierre, there was what Ben-Amos calls Rousseau’s more ‘integrative’ funeral, whose pastoral imagery soothed the crowds as the body made its way from its quiet grave on an island in a country lake to the national shrine ...”

“... comes from. When Spencer says, ‘Throughout my life I have been shocked by homophobia,’ he means something like: ‘Ever since I accepted myself as a gay person I have been ... ’ – but with this emendation ‘shocked’ is revealed as a weasel word. You can’t be shocked by something you‘re familiar with from the inside. More to the ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... of deferred repayments of an initial loan, calibrated according to income after university. But David Blunkett, the relevant minister at the time, decided that it should be imposed as an upfront charge, initially of £1000 per year. He also, in an equally ill-considered move, reduced maintenance grants. Most students felt worse off; most universities felt ...”

“... is for us to become psychotic. The Real is the McGuffin, the joker in the pack, the sign that means nothing but itself. Every signifying system, so Zizek claims, contains a kind of super-signifier whose function is just to point to the fact that the system can’t be totalised. It is that system’s point of internal fracture, marking the space where it ...”

“... esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... himself in the wicked world; the Disney Pinocchio always stands out as special and strange, as a means of exposing the ugliness of adult ways. It is his innocent artifice that makes him vulnerable to the horrible overtures of Stromboli, the Fox and the Cat. Watching him cheerfully stumble through the song ‘I’ve Got No Strings’, while surrounded by ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... Franzen, an apostate from their ranks, helped make the ex-theorist schlub a stock character. David Foster Wallace, a true believer of sorts, envied Dostoevsky’s pre-postmodern sincerity. Then everything seemed to get turned round and I was suddenly too old to be able to speak with confidence about the totality of Western culture, or to police an ...”